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An anonymous reader writes "With the release of 11.04 Natty Narwhal, Canonical is taking Ubuntu in a new direction, which puts cloud services and content like music at the forefront of the Ubuntu experience. Ubuntu is no longer 'Linux,' or 'desktop' or 'netbook'; it's just Ubuntu for clients and servers. Ubuntu has its own desktop in Unity, app store (Software Center), music service and personal cloud. If Ubuntu takes off, will it make Canonical the next Apple? Of course, Canonical doesn't sell computers, but then again Ubuntu can be used on any computer, even Macs."

Of course, the first thing that popped into my head when I read the line in the article where it says "Canonical doesn't make hardware" was "damn, I wish they would—we need an open source computing platform that's designed that way from the ground up instead if being designed to be locked down, and then hacked open."

At my local electronics society we use Ubuntu. We will not upgrade to 11.04, because of Unity and the abysmal problems we have had in the past with PulseAudio. A few members are currently looking how to configure Debian with all the bells and whistles we like and without the ones that Ubuntu wants to push upon us.

So that is 92 computers that Ubuntu will not be run anymore in the near future.

Except that anything that's not part of the primary feature set or user interaction path on Ubuntu tends to see bitrot, more so than in distros that don't try to tie everything together.

The reason is obvious; Ubuntu devs try very hard to create a unified and convenient experience (and they do, for a large class of users), and that work leads to the creation of code and features that sees a large amount of testing and use for the general case. They don't see a lot of testing for people who don't use the general case. For example, I was forced to switch away from 'wmii' when I discovered that key Ubuntu features didn't function well (or at all) if one didn't have a FreeDesktop.org tray for interacting with some Ubuntu core control mechanisms, and there were no discoverable command-line-driven accessors to those control mechanisms. This general class of problems has hit me every time Ubuntu saw a new six-month-release cycle.

The first response is usually "try an LTS release." LTS releases are nice for fire-and-don't-quite-forget systems and servers, where one can run apt-get update && apt-get-upgrade, but not need to install new packages often, if ever. On a desktop or workstation, or anything where any kind of development needs to be done, even Ubuntu's 3yr release cycle (which kicked Debian's butt when first adhered to) is slow. Proprietary vendors tend to release packages for the latest 6mo release, and the latest LTS if you're lucky.

The second response is usually "check the forums." The forums are (and always have been) a mess whenever one wanted to try something not-really-bleeding edge; often enough one would come across a thread four years out of date after seeing more recent threads referring queries to the "established" thread. In that time, APIs change, and even entire toolchains get deprecated and replaced.

The third response is usually "file bug reports!" or "contribute some changes!"... I've got friends who are Ubuntu devs or dedicated advocates, and I sometimes hear this from them, too. I don't have the time. Really, I don't. I managed to file three bugs this year. Two against Ekiga, and one against LibreOffice. That's a record for me. I didn't have time to follow up on questions around the Ekiga bugs, and I was fortunate someone else was able to reproduce the LibreOffice bug.

I'm not saying Ubuntu is inherently horrible; at times, it's the best tool for the job. However, I don't think the claim that getting back to tried-and-true is "only a few clicks away" exhibits an awareness of how rapidly non-default configurations on Ubuntu undergo bitrot.

I use Ubuntu only when I need something up and running fast. I use Debian or Gentoo when I need it up and running right. (Often Ubuntu server can stand in for Debian in server circumstances. It depends on whose LTS release has the package/version pairs I need)

Yep, that old saw. I'm not trying to talk trash about the Ubuntu forums, but they're obviously geared toward n00bs. I don't say that in any deprecating sense, that's a good thing, that's their user base, that's their market, and that's fine. But getting any assistance on any sort of remotely advanced topic is pretty much impossible. It's just not what they do.

Once upon a time, I was a slacker. And it was good. Then a shadowy figure wearing a Red Hat appeared. And I was no longer a slacker. Eventually, an African concept helped me realize I am who I am because of who we all are. But then who we all are became less and less for the people and that shadowy figure wearing a Fedora turned 14. And I became a convert once again.

All along, I kept in mind how important freedom is. So I frequented a strange land called

I was a Linux desktop user for 10 years and just switched to Mac - not because of some nebulous "experience"[...]but I was sick of waiting for my laptop to reboot all the time, and the MacBook is the first computer I've ever used where power management actually, really works. For me it's all about nuts and bolts.

So, basically, you switched for the user experience.

Why do Slashdotters think that "user experience" means "useless flashy graphics?" That's bullshit. "User experience" means "the machine does not frustrate the user." Nuts and bolts are an essential part of user experience, long before we get to the graphics/design stage. No amount of flashy graphics can cover up things that don't work.

But it can't be due to that! It has to be because he's a part of the Apple cult or he was taken in by the Job's Reality Distortion Field or he's some ignorant hipster! Apple can't possibly provide a better quality product that just doesn't fit into the Apple hater's universe of possibilities!

...after 10 years of using Linux he switches to Apple because it "just works"?

Stuff "just worked" on Mandrake and that came along less than 10 years after the beginning of Linux.

MacOS is less transparent, tends to castrate the usefulness of interfaces, tends to make dealing with legacy and alien data harder and tends to give you these all encompassing uber-apps that are like the exact opposite of the Unix approach to building tools.

Macs are very much like Windows machines in that you probably want to avoid

Nuts and bolts are an essential part of user experience, long before we get to the graphics/design stage

Very true and that is exactly why Unity is bullshit. It improves little to nothing, yet introduces a whole swoop of new bugs in incompatibles for no other reason then looking a little more hip and more like OSX. I would much prefer it when they would focus on making what they already have work proper.

The simple truth is that the whole "desktop experience" hasn't really changed a whole lot in the last 20 years, you click icons to start stuff, you push icons around to move files, etc. Its how Windows does it, its how MacOSX does it, its how the Amiga did it an pretty much everybody else. Small improvements here and there are nice and good, but what matters most is simply that what you have works properly and works for the tasks at hand, not just sometimes, but always and Ubuntu simply doesn't. On numerous upgrades the OpenGL driver killed itself, subpixel rendering is currently broken for me, network configuration also leaves a lot to be desired and multi monitor support while tolerable, but anything but great.

The forced Unity UI was easily the worst upgrade experience I had in Linux for quite some years, probably even worse then the switch from Gnome1 to Gnome2. Only thing that makes it somewhat tolerable is that so far it can be completely switched off, but it still seems to be an extremely stupid choice to force the UI on users via a dist-upgrade.

It works just fine on my Thinkpad running gentoo. Yes, there are chipsets with little or no acpi support in Linux -- so if you like using Linux don't buy those. You *did* check your choices against the lists of supported hardware before spending, right? 'Cause that usually works pretty well over here...:)

All power management features worked fine in Ubuntu on my laptop, until I did an upgrade. Now, after I close the lid, and reopen it, the screen flickers a few times, and then often the screen resolution is messed up.

One of my biggest frustrations with my most recent current Mac is the fact that there is no transparency when it comes to basic power management features that are mundane and standard even in Linux (namely CPU scaling).

I dunno. I always found power management just annoying. On Windows machines it always seems to take more time to recover from hibernation than it would take for a complete restart. Also, power management tends to kick in at random and very inconvenient times. Modern Linux can boot up fast enough that not powering of the machine completely (even to the point of disconnecting from mains) is less and less meaningful.

Also, I switched to Ubuntu because it gave me the "Mac style laptop experience" that some of th

No, really. Power management is one thing Apple does very well, whereas under Linux it's mixed. For instance, my desktop won't always return from sleep with the proprietary ATI drivers. It will when using the open driver, but with that driver, the GPU runs 20 degrees warmer.

Of course, if you use third-party hardware and drivers under OS X, you run into the same kind of problem. Using a RaLink networking card on my old Powerbook would consistently crash it when putting it to sleep.

People have been moving to other desktops like XFCE in droves because of Unity. Unity forces a cell phone UI on the desktop, and people hate it. There are threads with hundreds, even thousands of responses.

There's a perfectly good UI paradigm for the desktop that's been around since the 80's. Constantly reinventing the wheel is one of the things putting non-computer experts off Linux on the desktop. With Windows, some things change sure, but the basic metaphor (icons on the desktop, a start button to launch programs, a taskbar to show your running programs) has been perfectly good for years and people are used to it.

It's always more "fun" to invent some new half-baked thing than to spend time fixing bugs and problems, so that's what happens.

You missed the memo. We have to keep dumbing down Linux desktops until every last thing has been squeezed out. If you tailor your UI for the complete novice, as Gnome and Unity have been doing, that's great for like the first 2 days you use it. But that same philosophy causes problems for more advanced users because the features they want have been ripped out.

Also, they tend to do these "usability studies" where they conclude feature X was only used by 5% of the users, and feature Y by 3%, so it must be OK to sacrifice them on the altar of simplicity. But everyone has a different X or Y they use, so eventually this hurts _everybody_.

Please, Linux desktop people, STOP DUMBING IT DOWN! The world has other OSs out there for that kind of experience, We don't need to do that to every last Linux DE as well.

What is wrong with these guys? Do I have to write the damn thing myself?

I think we all know the answer to those questions, unfortunately: they aren't you, and yes.

The worst part of writing great software is knowing that you could build a better mousetrap, for any value of mousetrap, and at the same time realizing just how mind-numbingly long it will take you to do so. This is why good coders eventually give up and go into management.

"If I would have asked my customers what they wanted, they would have said 'a faster horse'." -Henry Ford

I agree that Unity isn't exactly a step forward, more like a side-step, but you can't blame them for trying to innovate. If "The Year of the Linux Desktop" is ever going to come around, it won't come around by imitating the competition, but trying to be better than the competition [gnome3.org]. It might take a while to get there, but every competing effort helps.

'There's a perfectly good UI paradigm for the desktop that's been around since the 80's...With Windows, some things change sure, but the basic metaphor...has been perfectly good for years and people are used to it.'

I'm probably a weirdo (actually I know I am), but I actually don't mind this release of Unity, and find that this version is significantly improved over the last one that shipped with Ubuntu Netbook Maverick Meerkat (10.10). The sidebar launcher automatically gets out of your way when you full-screen an app or drag a window to the side. It comes back when you mouse over the left side of your screen as needed. It's pretty easy to remove or add new icons (similar to how Windows 7 handles icons). It takes up a bit more space than I think it needs to, but for people who like big icons that's a plus. If you know the name of the app you want to launch, you can click the Ubuntu logo and type it into the search box, press enter, and it will launch (again similar to Windows 7).

I think the real problem people have with Unity is that they don't like change. What everyone needs to remember is that Ubuntu does not forbid you from downloading and installing your preferred window manager and customizing it to your taste. You can also download one of several flavors already configured with alternative popular window managers, and as pointed out elsewhere the default Gnome window manager can be selected during login and will remain the default until it is changed again. So think of Unity more as a default option. If you don't like it, you still have your power of choice, and there's still a lot of customization potential out there. At some point when I have free time to tinker I will likely set up FVWM with a neat custom retro layout. Until then I will be happy to continue using Unity.

Ubuntu is still LINUX. Anyone can set up their own distro, provided they have the time, resources and stamina to do so. That's what makes it so great.

I'm up in arms about the OSX user experience. What dumbass could possibly think it a good idea to put the application menus in the far top left of the screen, no matter how many applications are open, how large their windows are, or where they are located? Apple has managed to build a machine with a 2560x1440 pixel screen and a user interface that breaks down in any other use case than 'single application, maximzed'.

Consider the following: six terminal emulator windows will fit on a 1920x1200 pixel monitor. A user wants to change the title of one of them. Which makes more sense?

1) User moves their mouse toward the window they want to affect, opens the terminal menu, hits 'set title', and enters the title they want for that window.

2) User moves their mouse to a distant and totally unrelated part of the screen, opens the terminal menu, hits 'set title', and enters the title they want for that window. Which actually became the title of another terminal window, which the user did not want to change, because that window had focus at the time.

Skinflinting on screen real estate at the expense of intuitive placement and behavior only makes sense on 4 inch 800x480 pixel screen.

Actually, I'd call their naming strategy a success. In discussions about Ubuntu, I mostly see versions being referred to by the adjective part of the Adjectivated Animal pattern, rather than attempting to refer to the actual version name. People comparing Jaunty to Karmic seems to work remarkably well, unlike comparing 9.04 to 9.10, but like comparing Tiger to Leopard. Plus, ever since Breezy, they've been sticking to incrementing the initials of the name with every version, which is a damned handy mnemonic

Howso? I'm not a Mac person nor am I a Linuxhead. But I can tell you that most non-Mac people can name at least one of the Apple release titles, probably more, whereas mentioning Ubuntu will get you that blank stare.

The Ubuntu guys suck at marketing. Most of the Linux world sucks at marketing. One of the biggest reasons it's so hard for them to get any appreciable marketshare in the desktop world is that despite giving away what is very serviceable, functional product for free, they suck at marketing.

And without marketshare, how are you going to get the rest of the ecosystem to port over to you? Answer is, you aren't. Without a certain amount of marketshare, you can't get games ported, you can't get office applications ported, you can't even convince many of the makers to hire someone to make sure they are interoperable. And "Open Standards Open Standards Whee" as chanted by 4-year-old wannabe cheerleaders doesn't do crap for you when you're trying to sell adoption to someone and they have to interact with their clients, who all just-so-happen to use OSX or Windows with some form of MS Office (now with.DOCX so that OpenOffice is no longer interoperable... not that it ever rendered anything more than basic Excel docs correctly anyways) installed.

Same here. I have never managed to remember the name. In fact, searching for some particular feature/bugs etc for a given version of Ubuntu is a nightmare for me - without knowing the names. So then there is the extra search for looking for correct name for a given number - which evaporates from my memory within 5 minutes.

In general, why do we need names while numbers work perfectly fine? Ubuntu version number scheme is one of the best and is very easy to remember it. Android is following the same confusing

Actually, the Ubuntu names are much easier to search for because they are less common. I always figured that this was their motive for choosing them. For example, you can type "natty virtualbox" or "lucid virtualbox" and get relevant results quickly and easily, that are zeroed in on what you are looking for.

I've long said one of the things that hold back open source products from wider acceptance is that the OS/free software communities absolutely suck at marketing. Marketing isn't everything... the product has to be good... but plenty of good products have failed because the marketing effort behind them wasn't up to par. Mindshare is very often won on the ad page. Like it or not, that's reality. This is why companies spend untold millions on marketing. It's important.

Are you countertrolling? Because I. Will. Bite. That really is an embarrassing name. I think people should have a sense of humor too, but for the love of all that is open, consider the impact naming has on adoption.

Think carefully. The same principle applies to selling an operating system. Or we can make it a car analogy - you'll sell more of the same car by naming it the "Mustang" instead of the "Cute Cuddly Kitten."

Maybe if you see Apple as a company providing a solution to a wider computing need rather then a hardware and sofware manufacturer, but I would say no.

That said, I do welcome a complete approach, and also taking radical steps on the desktop (despite using Ubuntu on my HTPC and work computer I'm not a huge fan of Gnome or KDE). I tried installing Ubuntu 11.04 on a vmware virtual today and never even managed to get it to boot to the desktop. I guess I would not have managed to test Unity even if I reached the

Apple was never really a software company at its heart. It was always a hardware company that chose to write its own software.

IMHO, we should all violently protest cloud computing because eventually you will be paying a monthly fee for software and therefore will eventually pay for apps over and over and over ad nauseum until your bank account is empty.

Canonical may be forcing people to use PCs like they use cellphones, but people don't like this.

They will never manufacture hardware as Apple does because it's antithetical to what they are. They will never have the control over compatibility issues that Apple does as a result.

Linux unfortunately has no penetration into consumer computing space, but it's for some very good reasons that aren't going to be overcome by trying to turn people's desktops into iPhones vis-a-vis Unity

Canonical may be forcing people to use PCs like they use cellphones, but people don't like this.

You may not like this (I don't either), but people in general like a computer that is an appliance. This is the reason that the iPad (and other applie products) has caught on so well in the past few years. People never liked dealing with drivers, compatibility, registry editors, getting apps from reliable sources, or system configuration. They want a device that just does what they need, and they don't care if it's highly configurable, so long as it turns on and works every time they go to use it.

Yes, but people want the dumbed down version.They want a device with minimal to no worries, that has a simple way to run the applications they want to run. Whether its a spread sheet, a game, or watch a TV show.

Quite frankly, I don't blame them. It's not for me, but owning a PC is becoming an expensive nightmare.

The reason people are purchasing these "appliances" from Apple is actually quite simple.They work within their ecosystem and offer the ability to get what people want.Now, having said that, there are many more people rocking an iPod than there are ones rocking a complete Apple ecosystem because it's easy to use, easy to get what you want, can be used on the major OS's quite easily (other than iTunes being a crappy manager), and despite other manufacturers attempts, it really is one of the better. more easil

If Canonical DID start selling computers, it would force the last vestiges of Hardware bits to make an effort to write good drivers for Linux. The biggest problem, to this day, is drivers. The last time I had a laptop and tried to get wireless LAN working on it in Linux, it was painful. Had to install a wrapper to finally get it to work. Sorry, but that just doesn't cut it. And lets not talk about Video drivers either or you'll really get depressed.

...this is one area where Canonical continues to not practice what it preaches. It likes to pretend to be like Apple but it never really executes. This is in contrast to other distributors in the past that have actually made efforts to make meaningful improvements to Linux either by contributing to these drivers or to useful hardware documentation. (Yes, this is my "Why can't Canonical be more like old Suse" rant.)

Apple is first and foremost a hardware company that uses software and services to give it a competitive advantage selling hardware. Canonical is a services company that uses open source software to advance its services business. App stores, clouds and streaming are not unique to Apple or central to its business.

design is arguably a strength of ubuntu, I think they are getting pretty damn good at it too.It runs on everything, which is a unique strength compared to others. Eventually, instead of having a different os on every gadget, ubuntu on all.Its easy enough to use for non-techies (my whole family uses it) while having full linux power under the hood.They have tons of karma, I would like them to succeed, which hopefully is a common sentiment and will pay off.

We can only hope. Unity is GPL, as is the vast majority of the Linux ecosphere. If Ubuntu becomes as big as (i)OSX and Win7 everybody in the linux community will gain a tremendous amount. Drivers, support, money - it will all get exponentially better for us.

That will not happen at least in the next 10 years, and likely never. I have my wife using the last Long Term Support version of Ubuntu (Lucid) and after a few months of working fine it now locks up and freezes--requiring a power-off reboot--several times a day. I have reinstalled it fresh and it occasionally still does it. It's 2011, this is just completely unacceptable.

And then when you go to Ubuntu Forums to try to figure out how to fix it, you find 163 pages of suggested incantations to put into the

Apple is whatever it is because of its long story in taking unorthodox choices and consequent revolutions.
Which means a lot of work, a lot of betting and a bunch of wins.
What I've seen so far is changing a default color schema, a "new" font and a new naming schema.
Not even the "new" desktop is really new as

Unity is a shell interface for the GNOME desktop environment

(Very first line in Wikipedia [wikipedia.org])
Ubuntu, like Unity, is a shell around something else (Debian) with very limited value added.
Just "going to the clouds" (tm) doesn't make a winning company (alo because

Not a bunch of wins, just some wins. Apple has a long line of cast of products, market failure, and money spent on things that never made it to light. All of which is normal process for getting good products and RnD technologies.

Apple went to the major printer manufacturers and said "You should support Rendesvous/Bonjour". And they did it.

Apple went to the music labels and said "You should sell your stuff through iTunes - it's safe with our DRM". They later said "You guys should drop this DRM jazz". Both times they were heard, and Apple got the rights it needed.

Until Canonical can do something similar, they're not an Apple replacement candidate.

1) Unity is built on top of GNOME. They didn't develop even half of that.

1.5) Unity, IMHO, is much less usable than GNOME 3's default desktop and quite a few people I've seen online agree with me. This is not absolute though and YMMV.

2) Every other distribution (almost) has an "app store"; it's called a freaking package manager and they've been around for a long, long time. Simply having a simple-to-use UI for one doesn't exactly qualify it as an "app store".

3) The music service is just a re-branded 7Digital (which is a great place to buy music btw; they even sell some things in FLAC).

4) The "personal cloud" is just a Dropbox competitor (with syncing for some apps, which is a nice touch).

I have a feeling that these types of articles are only made for advertisement views and nothing more, as I've rarely seen an article like this that actually makes sense. Plus, Ubuntu is overhyped. I used it from 7.10 to 10.04, and after I tried switching to something else I never looked back. The exact same desktop I got in Ubuntu was actually less buggy in Arch Linux, which doesn't patch things nearly as much as Ubuntu does. Honestly, if you disregard the package manager, there's very, very, very little difference between Ubuntu and any of the other popular distributions like Fedora/OpenSUSE (if you're a desktop user that is). The only reason it's still popular, as far as I can figure out, is because it's hyped so much as being "the easiest" and "the most feature-filled" and whatnot, when every other distribution has caught up with and, dare I say, surpassed Ubuntu in usability.

Honestly Unity I had high hopes for until I tried living with it for a week with a RC.

It's great for insulating all the dirtyness of a computer from a user... including keeping all the utilities and configuration apps away from you. changing the power settings ended up a frustrating search and a give up to the Xterminal to do it by hand in a command prompt. It also is badly broken on laptops as it will not return to full brightness after a screen sleep like 10.10 did. I can close the lid and 60% of th

It might just be my setup (windows on master hd, ubuntu on slave) but when I first installed it, GRUB messed up and wouldn't boot. I had to manually edit the boot loader to make Ubuntu work. Last night I installed 11.04, system reboots and guess what! System won't boot. Another GRUB error. At that point I turned off my computer and said to hell with it.

I'm somewhat computer savvy as well. I build my own desktops, I've installed win98, win2k, winXP and Vista on machines before. If I'm having this much troubl

Who cares?? Linux is still open source, there IS still an alternative. If Canonical wants to push its own version to something apple-esque then thats their business. At the very least they are providing more variety of choices which is something you DONT get with apple. They are also helping to bring Linux to the mainstream so they must be doing something right. If you dont like it, stop complaining and go with one of the dozens of other distros.

For years, I've heard people complain that computer user interfaces are too complex and confusing. Recently, there's an enormous surge of enthusiasm for smartphones and tablets, and people keep saying how great the user interfaces are and how they prefer them to their desktops, despite the small screens with tiny print and the tiny keyboards.

Perhaps smartphone UIs are actually really good UIs, and there are lessons to learn from them. Perhaps users who are used to smartphone UIs would prefer similar UIs on desktops.

One thing I want from a general UI is for it to get the fsck out of the way when I'm using an application. Smartphone UIs are good at this. Unity is good at this.

A lot of the differences have decreased since the release of Windows 7, but until then, if you put a non-expert Mac, Windows and Linux user in a conference room with their laptops, and asked them to perform a set of common tasks as quickly as possible, the Mac user would win hands-down every time. E.g.: connect a newly purchased printer and print a colour document, connect to a new wireless network and download a file, connect to a video projector and display a presentation with a presenter view on the lap